The Grammar of Sense: Is word-sense tagging much more than part-of-speech tagging?

This squib claims that Large-scale Automatic Sense Tagging of text (LAST) can be done at a high-level of accuracy and with far less complexity and computational effort than has been believed until now. Moreover, it can be done for all open class words, and not just carefully selected opposed pairs as in some recent work. We describe two experiments: one exploring the amount of information relevant to sense disambiguation which is contained in the part-of-speech field of entries in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE). Another, more practical, experiment attempts sense disambiguation of all open class words in a text assigning LDOCE homographs as sense tags using only part-of-speech information. We report that 92% of open class words can be successfully tagged in this way. We plan to extend this work and to implement an improved large-scale tagger, a description of which is included here.